NY Times:
Anxious congressional Democrats are threatening to abandon President Obama on a central element of his signature health care law, voicing increasing support for proposals that would allow Americans who are losing their health insurance coverage because of the Affordable Care Act to retain it.
The dissent comes as the Obama administration released enrollment figures on Wednesday that fell far short of expectations, and as House Republicans continued their sharp criticism of administration officials at congressional hearings examining the performance of the health care website and possible security risks of the online insurance exchanges.
In addition, a vote is scheduled Friday in the Republican-controlled House on a bill that would allow Americans to keep their existing health coverage through 2014 without penalties. The measure, drafted by Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, is opposed by the White House, which argues that it would severely undermine the Affordable Care Act by allowing insurance companies to continue to sell health coverage that does not meet the higher standard of Mr. Obama’s health care law.
Fallout from the web site not working right, which leads to poor enrollment numbers, which makes Democrats very nervous. Still...
Politico:
The political calculus is straightforward, Democrats say. Voters are uncomfortable with the ACA, but private polling shows they are receptive to a “mend it, don’t end it” message. If Democratic House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates can show they want to fix the law proactively, the party believes voters will forgive some bungling by the administration. And if some Democrats are inching away from the president in an awfully public fashion, lawmakers say they have felt little pressure from the White House and other party leaders to make the existing text of the ACA a political hill to fight and die on.
“This is not about loyalty to the White House. It’s about getting the health care law right for the American people,” said Vermont Rep. Peter Welch. “This is a situation where good implementation is good politics.”
Jonathan Cohn:
Me? Barring unforeseen developments or wrinkles in this report, I’m sticking with my story. The October numbers are low, which was to be expected given the website problems and tendency of people not to buy insurance right away. But what matters isn’t the figures for October or even November. It’s December and the months that follow—particulalry into next year, as the prospect of paying fines for uninsurance start to hit people in the face. "It's too early to say anything useful," says Jonathan Gruber, professor of economics at MIT. "And, really, I don't think we can draw any significant conclusions about effectiveness of the law until March, because any firm conclusion requires effects of individual mandate to be felt."
More politics and policy below the fold.
Greg Sargent quotes Larry Levitt, Kaiser Foundation:
“That’s one of the most telling numbers — a million people have been determined eligible,” Levitt tells me. “That means if the website had been working well, and a million people had gotten to the end of the process, we’d be looking at a very different trajectory now. We heard about the surge in traffic when HealthCare.gov went live. This suggests there is in fact a lot of interest.”
The thing is, though, that even this one-million number highlights both the perils and the potential upsides in not getting the damn website fixed. It shows us that if it isn’t fixed demand isn’t going to matter at all — enrollment will be very low, regardless of demand, putting Obamacare’s long term prospects in peril. But if it does get fixed, of course, you could see a real enrollment spike.
“Assuming the website gets fixed, I would assume a surge of enrollment in December, and another surge in March,” Levitt tells me...
Levitt puts it simply: “We’ve heard all about the negatives of the Affordable Care Act. This is the first tangible sign of what the ACA set out to do, which is to cover people.”
Erik Wemple on how CBS screwed up again:
There may never be a more classic line in the pantheon of empty boasts by competitive news organizations. On Monday night, CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson came up with what looked like a significant story: “Memo warned of “limitless” security risks for HealthCare.gov.” As the story and on-air broadcast alleged, the person entrusted with putting together HealthCare.gov was “apparently kept in the dark about serious failures in the website’s security. Those failures could lead to identity theft among [those] buying insurance.”
How did Attkisson know this? “CBS News has obtained the first look at a partial transcript of his testimony.”
Which is like saying you’ve got the exclusive on half the story...
“So when CBS Evening News ran its report based on a leak, presumably from the [Republican] staff, but we don’t know — of a partial transcript — excerpts from a partial transcript — they said the security issues raised in the document, and I quote, ‘could lead to identity theft among buying insurance,’ that cannot be true based on what we established in our back and forth. Is that correct?”
Chao replied: “That’s correct. I think there was some rearrangement of the words I used during the testimony and how it was portrayed.”
Still,
Ezra Klein runs down the problems (there are many) with Obamacare this week;
Obamacare is in much more trouble than it was one week ago
WaPo on the fallout:
The pair of recent polls also showed a continuing decline in his approval rating, tracking several other national surveys that have the president near new lows in overall popularity. But Obama has rebounded from such dips before, in part because much of the country still liked him personally and trusted him politically.
That political cushion has virtually disappeared, with his marks on honesty only slightly better than his poor approval rating.
The plummet in public confidence in Obama’s character poses a much larger problem for his governing agenda and for his legacy than general approval ratings. The erosion comes primarily from independent voters and from his own base, crucial to his party’s success in next year’s midterm elections.
The impact of the slide could be wide-ranging. His pursuit of a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, for example, may be more difficult to sell to a less-trusting public, especially given strong resistance in Congress and in Israel.
The policy is sound, but that web site has to work so people can register.
The politics are something else altogether.
Rick Perlstein on the current tea party radicals, same as the old RWNJ radicals.
I could proliferate the analogies endlessly: the New Right ideologues who called the newly elected President Reagan a sellout (a 1982 article in Richard Viguerie’s Conservative Digest devoted two pages to attacking the establishment cast of White House state dinners); the Gingrich revolutionaries who horrified establishment Republican leaders by squandering the party’s historic 1994 takeover of Congress with their insistence on shutting down the government. Each and every time, the right-wing fire-breathers insist that the only reason their insurrection failed was that they hadn’t been conservative enough.
No historical analogies are exactly precise. I offer these to drive home a point. The phrase “Tea Party conservatives” is on everyone’s lips these days. And because the movement has a new identity (although if I were being pedantic, I’d point out that conservatives in 1975 called for citizens to staple tea bags to their IRS returns to protest high taxes, even though President Ford, like President Obama, had just lowered taxes), the temptation has been to depict the Tea Party’s brand of reactionary extremism as a new thing, too. Their radicalism this fall has indeed been breathtaking. But understanding today’s right-wing insurgency as a new phenomenon only weakens our attempts to defeat it. Grasping it instead as the product of a slow, steady evolution is our only hope of stopping the cycle before it repeats itself anew.
An oft-observed theme. Are they
John Birchers?
Neo-confederates?
Jacksonians?
The new New Right? They're the same old same old, actually. And (see next link) they still control the GOP.
Alan Abramowitz:
These results indicate why it will be very difficult for mainstream Republican leaders and business groups to successfully challenge Tea Party incumbents and why such efforts could even backfire on the party establishment. Tea Party supporters now dominate the activist base of the Republican Party. In 2012 they made up nearly two-thirds of those who reported voting in Republican presidential primaries, and in 2014 they may well make up an even larger majority of those voting in what are likely to be very low turnout congressional primaries. Some might argue that the recent special election GOP primary in Alabama’s 1st Congressional District might augur well for the Republican establishment as the establishment-backed candidate defeated the Tea Party-backed one. However, it was a narrow five-point win that saw overwhelming resources put at the establishment candidate’s disposal. If anything, the ANES survey data suggest that a more realistic scenario in next year’s primaries is that more establishment Republican incumbents will be unseated by Tea Party challengers.